'The Plains' by Gerald Murnane (Review)

I've been meaning to read more Australian literature for a while now, but my focus on fiction in translation has got in the way of that a little.  Actually, that's a slight understatement - in the first eight months of the year, I didn't manage to review a single Australian book...

However, with a trip to the Melbourne Writers Festival on the agenda, it was time to crack open one of the many books languishing on my shelves.  Gerald Murnane is a writer I've been wanting to try for some time, and (as I mentioned in my festival review) he's certainly an entertaining speaker.  Let's see what I think about his writing ;)

*****
The Plains, one of the first titles in the Text Classics series, is a short novel written back in 1982.  It follows a man who ventures into inland Australia to explore 'the plains', an undefined area away from the noise of the east-coast cities.  His reason for visiting the interior is to work on a film, a piece which will capture the splendour of the wide-open expanses, and after a short period of adjustment, he meets a group of local landowners, whose patronage is vital if he is to be able to work on his project.

Things are very different on the plains, though, and time passes differently to how it moves in 'Outer Australia'.  As the days pass, we suspect that there is very little chance of the film ever being finished, the man's lengthy stay reaching epic proportions.  Still, the longer he works on his project, the more he realises that the plains are worth studying - even if he'll never be able to understand them completely.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is pretty much the whole plot of The Plains - if you're the kind of reader who likes things to, you know, happen in a novel, then I'd advise you to cut your losses here and go and find something else to do.  This is a work which moves at its own pace, a novel which, while it might be interested in may things, has little time for a reader who isn't prepared to settle down and forget the call of the outside world for a while.

The physical setting of the novel is the key to understanding it, and the filmmaker lays it out for us right at the start:

"Unchecked by hills or mountains, the sunlight in summer occupied the whole extent of the land from dawn till sunset.  And in winter the winds and showers sweeping across the great open spaces barely faltered at the few stands of timber meant as shelter for men or animals.  I knew that there were great plains of the world that lay for months under snow, but I was pleased that my own district was not one of them.  I much preferred to see all year the true configuration of the earth itself and not the false hillocks and hollows of some other element.  In any case, I thought of snow (which I had never seen) as too much a part of European and American culture to be appropriate to my own region."
pp.6/7 (Text Classics, 2012)

At times, the novel takes care in its description of the outside environment, the lengthy, unhurried passages contributing to the leisurely pace of the novel.

However, the detailed description is actually at odds with the vague nature of the location of the plains.  We know that we are in the interior, but where exactly the filmmaker has ended up is fairly unimportant.  One thing we do know is that the plainsmen have a great suspicion for anything which comes from the coast - or "Outer Australia"...

The filmmaker learns of the two great art groups of the region, rivals who debate the nature of the beauty of the plains.  However, when a third group attempts to spread its own views, the Horizonites & Haremen unite to drive out this 'foreign' concept:

"They discredited it finally on the simple grounds that it was derived from ideas current in Outer Australia.  The plainsmen were not always opposed to borrowings and importations, but in the matter of culture they had come to scorn the seeming barbarisms of their neighbours in the coastal cities and damp ranges.  And when the more acute plainsmen had convinced the public that this latest group were drawing on a jumble of the worst kinds of foreign notions, the members of the despised group chose to cross the Great Dividing Range rather than endue the enmity of all thinking plainsmen." (pp.33/4)

This idea of hostility to the big cities and 'Inner Australia' as a true nation might seem far-fetched, but it really is a different world away from the East Coast (Western Australia, for example, the large state on the other coast of the continent, often sees itself as a very different entity to the rest of the country...).

Putting aside the disputes with Outer Australia, though, life passes slowly on the plains, frustratingly so for anyone hoping to get things done.  The filmmaker's wait for an audience with the landowners takes much of the first part of the novel, and his days in the landowner's private library (mostly spent gazing out at a restricted view of the plains) pretty much fills up the rest of the book.  In fact, the more you think about The Plains, with its nameless characters, the futility of the main character's quest, with a film never to be finished, the more other writers' work comes to mind.

The quiet, ever-changing library, and the odd sense of time passing and yet standing still, definitely has shades of Borges, albeit a much more relaxed Borges, but the sheer futility of much of what happens reminds me unmistakably of Kafka.  We mustn't forget that this is Australia, though.  While Kafka's protagonists race around, shouting, blustering, hoping to force their way into seeing the right people, Murnane's creation is very much a man of his people.  He's happy to take his time - his appointment is in a pub, not a cramped office - and while he's waiting he may as well have a beer or five, as do his interviewers when he finally gets to join them...

The Plains is a beautiful, understated piece of writing, a relatively short book, but one which leaves the reader with a lot to think about.  Quite apart from deciding which of the rival camps to side with on the question of the beauty of the plains (does it lie in the vast, endless horizon or the microscopic detail of ears of wheat?), we are asked to contemplate the idea that possibilities are more important than achievements.  You see, when things are achieved, the other possibilities disappear (which again hints that the man's film is highly unlikely to be completed...).

The people of the plains go in for their own form of philosophy, one which looks for the meaning of life in a focus on very subjective truths:

"What might not follow, they ask themselves, if there should be nothing more substantial in all our experience than those discoveries that seem too slight to signify anything apart from their own brief occurrence?  How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others?  And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?" (pp.110/1)

Which is probably a good place to note that any attempt to decipher Murnane's work is probably doomed to failure.  As he said in his talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival, nobody could ever come close to understanding what he wants to say through his work and what his novels mean to him...

Still, despite being indecipherable (and virtually plotless), The Plains is a great read, a soothing piece of writing which leaves you vaguely glimpsing a concealed philosophy, but unable to quite discern its contours - and yet you're not really that bothered (this is Australia, after all...).  I'm definitely keen to read more of Murnane's work, especially his first book, Tamarisk Row, and his latest, A Million Windows, as they were the ones discussed most in his talk.  Outwardly, Murnane and his novels are very Australian, but there's definitely something else waiting to be discovered at the core of his work - if you're just patient enough to wait for it to reveal itself...

Oh, while you're waiting, why not get yourself a cold one? ;)

Tony's Reading List at the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival - Part Two

As you may have seen yesterday, the first half of my day at the Melbourne Writers Festival ended on a bit of a sour note, but after a couple of sandwiches and a walk in the unseasonal sunshine, it was time to get back into the thick of things - and luckily the next session was much more to my liking :)

*****
After a couple of low-key events in the ACMI Cube, it was upstairs to Cinema 1 for the main session of the day, an audience with well-known Australian writer Gerald Murnane.  Moderator Antoni Jach introduced Murnane with a string of superlatives, including "...our best bet for a Nobel prize in the next ten years or so...", all of which are probably true.  Of course, what he didn't say was that Murnane is the grumpy old man of Australian literature and with him you never know what you're going to get.  Happily for us in the audience, today was a good day :)

Ostensibly, the writer was there to discuss his latest novel, A Million Windows, but this was a fairly free-range session with the discussion wandering throughout his career (although the one book I have read, The Plains - review pending - wasn't mentioned).  In fact, there were several mentions of two books which haven't even been published yet - one a treatise on horse-racing (which Murnane thought was non-fiction until his publisher told him otherwise), the other (Border Districts) a book he wants to be his last (which is why it won't be published until he's sure he's done with writing).

While some interesting things were said about his approach to writing, particularly in talking of his debut work, Tamarisk Row, with his unconventional style and lengthy, overwhelming sentences, the main thing I got from the session was the way in which an accomplished writer with a distinguished background had everyone in the palm of his hand, despite the fact that he doesn't really like this kind of thing (at the end he quipped that we were lucky as we might be the last ones to ever see him do a festival session!).

Murnane is funny and irascible, prone to wandering off on tangents (Jach was well aware that his role was to allow the writer as much range as he wished) and always ready with a good yarn.  At one point he brought out an essay from his university time so that we could hear the lecturer's comments bemoaning his lack of understanding of morality in literature.  At which point he claimed that he still has no idea what she was talking about - but it never stopped him writing all his books...

He's also very good for quotations, and I wasn't the only one in the audience scribbling away furiously to get his one-liners down on paper.  For example, on being free from the early pressure to make his work 'publishable': "I'm almost in the position where I can insult readers now."  Or on being a fairly normal bloke when out in the community and not writing: "I didn't see any need to grow a beard or wear a beret - apologies to those who do."  Or on his failure to become a poet, a disarming "I gave it away", an Australianism for giving something up...

There's too much to discuss here, whether it's his liking for a sympathetic narrator in the vein of Hardy or Trollope, or his dislike of dialogue (which he says conceals more than it reveals), but I definitely came out of the session wanting to read more of his work, which can only be a good thing.  Mention was made of his appearance in the Music & Literature magazine, and that's something I'd like to have a look at - first, though, I want to try some more of his books :)

*****
Murnane was always going to be a hard act to follow, but the last session of the day was entertaining nonetheless.  It was back to the Cube for the second of the City-to-City talks, and this time Nic Low was chatting to Liliy Yulianti Farid and Ahmad Fuadi about Jakarta.  Fortunately, both are fairly fluent in English, which avoided the embarrassment of the earlier Shanghai session...

The two writers talked about the disproportionate influence the capital has on Indonesian culture (apparently 80% of national book sales are in the Jakarta region), a fact which is merely a reflection of the same trend in all walks of Indonesian life.  Where in China, for example, Beijing and Shanghai are competitors, Jakarta is in a league of its own, and people from the provinces are well aware that they have to make the move there one day if they want to become a success.

However, things are changing, and both writers talked about the role they play in making things happen.  Fuadi briefly mentioned Bali's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, including (I think...) some visits to Australia by Indonesian writers, and after I asked the pair about the apparent lack of Indonesian fiction in translation, Farid outlined her work with the Lontar Foundation and the Inside Indonesia magazine.  Indonesia is also guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair next year, so the government is now putting a lot more energy (and money!) into getting Indonesian fiction into English and German.  Hopefully, there'll be a few new authors for us to discover over the coming years :)

*****
And that's all for 2014!  I greatly enjoyed my busy day in out of the sun at the festival, but I wouldn't say I'm completely happy with the whole event.  The City-to-City sessions weren't really what I expected, focusing more on general information than on the literary side of the cities (although the two Indonesian writers did speak about this a little more during the question time), and the Shanghai session was only saved by the humour of Ouyang Yu.

The main issue I have, though, is that as far as translated fiction goes this was pretty much it.  The whole festival runs for eleven days, but if you're looking for non-Anglophone writers, you're out of luck, and I think that for a multicultural city like Melbourne, it's a bit of a shambles really.  Here's hoping that next year the organisers decide that overseas writers can be found outside the UK and the US and that there'll be a few big names on the programme.

I'm not holding my breath, though...

Tony's Reading List at the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival - Part One

Friday the 22nd of August was a beautiful late-winter day in Melbourne, and it also happened to be the day for my annual visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival.  I only go in for one day, but I do my best to make the most of it, and this year I managed to fit four events into about five-and-a-half hours.  And what, exactly, did I see?  Well, stick around, and you'll find out...

*****
One of the main reasons I ended up making the trip in to the big city was the (free) event with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego, whose novel Antón Mallick Wants to be Happy I read a few days before heading to the festival.  This was actually a late addition to the programme after the cancellation of another event, and many of the people who attended were actually unaware of this - the printed programme still had the old details...

The event was MCed by local academic and translator Lilit Thwaites, and considering that the majority of the people in the small ACMI Cube room had heard of neither the book nor the writer, it all went fairly smoothly.  Both Thwaites and Casariego read short extracts from the novel, and they then discussed the book, particularly in relation to similarities between the writer and the eponymous hero of the novel.

The book (which I will be reviewing in early September) is the diary of a man seeking happiness, and one way in which he does so is through an analysis of self-help books and classics.  Casariego said that the reading was perhaps the best part of the writing process; however, he's not a fan of self-help books himself, believing that they're rather aggressive and help to create egotistical monsters.  As for the other books he read in the search for Antón's happiness, he actually preferred some of the more pessimistic ones...

Antón Mallick... is a funny book, something which Casariego says isn't true for all of his works.  One of his biggest challenges was to temper the use of humour in the book, lest it overpower and overshadow the story (certainly, the early sections have a lot of scenes where getting a laugh is the main focus).  The style of the novel, written in the form of a diary, is also important as it allowed the writer to play with the reader.  For one thing, he was able to be a little less politically correct than is normally the case as Mallick is writing for himself, with no need for self-censorship.  However, it also allows him to be a little tricky as there's no guarantee that Antón is telling even himself the whole truth...

Never one to hold back, I asked Casariego a question at the end of the session.  You see, with so many loose ties at the end of the novel, I was wondering if the writer had ever considered a sequel to Antón's quest for happiness.  The answer was a fairly firm 'no', but now that the idea had come up... ;)  If Antón Mallick does return for a second outing, then, you know who to thank/blame :)

*****
After a thirty-minute break spent chatting to Lilit, getting my book signed by the author and cramming a sandwich down as fast as possible, it was back to the cube for the second of the day's events.  This was one of the four City-to-City events designed to give insular Australians more information about some of our Asian neighbours, and the first in the series was on Shanghai.  Author Nic Low was the moderator, and the guests were famed Sino-Australian writer Ouyang Yu (Sino-Australian in that he's lived and worked here for a good while) and two fellow Chinese academics, Gong Jing and Hongtu Wang.

In all honesty, this was by far the weakest of the four sessions I attended.  As an ESL teacher, I've spent many an hour listening to Chinese students reading a prepared script while other students struggle to understand what's being said, and this hour was like a flashback to presentation moderations of times past.  Jing, in particular, merely read a text talking about her life in Shanghai and then barely offered a word in English for the rest of the hour.  When you add to that the fact that the session actually had very little to do with literature, you can imagine how disappointed (and bored) I was for the most part...

Luckily, the third member of the panel was a far better, and more charismatic, speaker, and Yu entertained and informed the small audience with his Shanghai experiences.  From his anecdote about his introduction to Australian literature (when getting his first academic position, all he knew about it was that in Patrick White's fiction "people farted a lot"), to the poems he wrote on his return to Shanghai, about a cheap hotel room and a student who simply could not master a point of English grammar ("She wrote 'Aftering I finished the exam, I felting bad.' - I felt bad too."), Yu was a relaxed, witty speaker - I really must get around to reading one of his books...

Still, it wasn't quite enough to make this a session I would recommend to others, and I walked out hoping that the rest of the day would be better.  The good news?  It definitely was - but you'll have to wait until next time to find out why ;)

'My Blood's Country' by Fiona Capp (Review)

It's time for the last of my Christmas Humbook books, the second of Lisa's choices - and it was left to last for a reason.  Firstly, it's a biography (I don't read many of them); secondly, it's a biography of a poet (I'm not much of a fan of poetry); thirdly, it discusses a poet I'd never heard of...

Hmm, long odds here.  So, what will I make of this one?

*****
My Blood's Country is an attempt by writer and journalist Fiona Capp to follow in the footsteps of poet and activist Judith Wright, a very well-known Australian (well, to anyone born here, anyway!).  Capp met Wright for the first time when the older poet came to talk to her school, and she has been obsessed with her work ever since, also keeping up a relationship through letters and occasional visits.

After Wright's death, Capp goes on a pilgrimage of sorts, visiting the three main areas where Wright spent her life in the hope of understanding the effect the environment played on the poetry.  There is another motive however.  She is also half-hoping to see traces of Wright herself in the places she visits...

My Blood's Country isn't a biography as such; it's really more of a travel book.  Capp takes the reader on a trip to the New England plains in New South Wales, Mount Tambourine in Queensland and Mongarlowe, away in the Canberra Hinterland.  By seeing where Wright lived, we (hopefully) will understand her poetry more and also gain an insight into some of her other passions.

While it's not a biography though, we do get a fair bit of information about the poet's life.  Wright comes from a famous farming family in New England, one which owned vast tracts of land, and her grandmother May, the Wright matriarch, shrewdly made the family's fortune with her sound management of the estates.

Judith Wright was initially proud of her background, but in later life she began to turn away from this view.  She started to see the darker side of the family's fortunes, and as a woman (in a family which became ironically patriarchal) she was never going to inherit the land.  In fact, she was destined to lose it completely as one of her brothers overextended and had to sell up, information which had Capp musing:

"The irony, I couldn't help thinking as I wandered the garden at Wallamumbi, was that her exclusion from ownership of the property and the inevitable sense of exile this bred was what had made her a poet.  As is often the case with those whose great achievement is to transform their personal suffering or pain into a work of art, her loss was our gain."
p.47 (Allen & Unwin, 2012)

The loss of Wright's childhood home was a double-edged sword - a sad affair, but one which helped make her the poet she was...

Wright also began to realise the role her family had played in the displacement of the local Indigenous people, with her parents' wealth coming at the expense of the traditional way of life.  When her father reveals the story behind the name of a rock called 'Darkies' Point', she is horrified, and this shock and anger helps propel her into her later career as an activist for reform.

It's the environment though which seemed to be Wright's major love.  Capp concentrates on the natural features of the places the poet lived, and each of three main homes showcases a different feature of Australian nature.  There are beautiful descriptions of the tablelands, the subtropics and the bush, and Capp learns from Wright of the importance of native plants.

Moving away from Wright though, My Blood's Country is just as much about Capp herself as it is about her subject.  This is, in part, her story, an attempt to understand the woman she regarded as a mentor and a friend.  Wright imparted her first advice when Capp was a schoolgirl - in a polite letter:

"I think one of the best disciplines I know of, for young Australians brought up on a diet of English poetry, is to study Chinese and Japanese poems - if not in the original, which you probably never will be able to, then in the best translations you can get.  Their kind of aesthetic, which is a bad word for something important, is much sterner and less sloppy than ours, and it does anyone good to try to pare down words to essentials and to see things clearly." (p.5)

The stripped-back style of Japanese and Chinese poetry obviously had its appeal for Wright at that period of her life, and Capp comments that it is typical for her stark, simple writing.

Capp's hope of retracing Wright's steps in order to better understand her, to somehow reencounter her, are doomed to failure though.  Nothing remains of the past, and the quest becomes an impossible, elusive journey.  The younger writer is disappointed by how the reality differs from the images (gleaned from poems) in her head...

My Blood's Country is an interesting read, even if it's a little confused in its focus.  What is it meant to be?  Is it a biography, a travel book or a story of self-discovery?  It's enjoyable enough, but I suspect that it would be a lot more so if you had heard of the writer before reading it.  Lisa hinted that finishing this book would leave me wanting to try Wright's poems - I'm not so convinced, but you never know...

Before I leave you though, there was one coincidental connection I discovered while reading the book.  Wright's daughter, Meredith McKinney, is a renowned translator of Japanese literature, having brought several classics into English, including... Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura.  And?  Well, I'm a big fan of his (I reread this book very recently), and this was one of my return Humbook choices!

Over to you, Lisa ;)

'Happy Valley' by Patrick White (Review)

After my recent review of Le Colonel Chabert, today it's time for the second of my Christmas Humbook selections.  Lisa, of ANZ LitLovers LitBlog, chose a couple of Aussie books for me to try, and this post looks at the first of them.  The novel is not widely read, but the writer is very well-known...

*****
Patrick White is still Australia's only real Nobel Prize for Literature winner (for me, the South-African import J.M. Coetzee doesn't really count...), and Happy Valley, brought out in the Text Classics series, was his first novel, a book which he refused to allow to be republished during his lifetime.  It's a shame because it's a great read, an addition to the body of Australian country literature and an ideal entry into White's work for new readers.

Happy Valley is a small town in country New South Wales, and the story takes place in the mid-to-late 1930s.  It used to be a gold-mining boom town, but now it's sparsely populated, a sleepy bush town with little going on.  The first few chapters introduce us to the town, and some of its residents, seen through the (cinematic) eyes of a hawk, hovering high overhead.  This artistic touch is soon addressed in true Aussie fashion though, as several of the characters think about shooting it down...

In these first few chapters, we meet several pivotal characters.  There's a new arrival, farm manager Clem Hagan, brought in to oversee work on the land of the Furlow family, and Doctor Oliver Halliday, bored of marriage and bored of life in Happy Valley.  Among the women, we meet potential spinster Alys Browne, and Sidney Furlow, a local heiress, beautiful and cold.  And always in the background, the Quongs, descendants of a Chinese immigrant, shopkeepers and silent witnesses to what happens in the town.

On the one hand, Happy Valley is one of those typical tales of the Australian country with its blistering summer heat, isolation, and bushfires.  There's a sense familiar to anyone who's read Oz-Lit before.  One of the minor characters, Sidney's English suitor, feels completely out of his depth:

"There is something here completely foreign to anything I know, felt Roger Kemble, those hands that touch a different substance, and despising what I touch."
p.167 (Text Classics, 2012)

The reader, however, is in very familiar territory.

White draws a skillful picture of the isolated town, small and run-down:

"Happy Valley became that peculiarly tenacious scab on the body of the brown earth.  You waited for it to come away leaving a patch of pinkness underneath.  You waited and it did not happen, and because of this you felt there was something in its nature particularly perverse." (p.138)

It's a town of few amusements, just the pub, the weekly picture hall and the annual races, and in a place where everyone knows everyone else, the arrival of a stranger (Hagan) is a big event.  What really raises interest though is when bored men and women start to look around for something to distract themselves from the torpor of everyday existence - now infidelity is really interesting...

At the heart of the story are the attempts some characters make to break free of the crushing gravitational pull of the town.  Vic Moriarty, the frustrated wife of the sickly local teacher is drawn to bad boy Clem (who also has his eyes fixed elsewhere...).  Dr. Halliday, trapped in a loveless marriage with an older woman, is looking for a transfer to Queensland, but is distracted by a blossoming friendship.  Alys Browne wants to escape to California, and is waiting for her ship (or her shares) to come in.  Many want to leave the town - it's doubtful though whether they'll actually ever manage it...

Happy Valley is a book built around the main love triangles, but there's so much more to enjoy.  White creates a great ensemble cast of characters, including the inscrutable Quongs.  The family faces subtle (and unsubtle) discrimination, looked down upon by the Anglo residents, tolerated for their use in providing daily goods.  Yet they are actually the locals, there from start to finish - the whites are the ones who are simply passing through...

In addition to the interesting plot, the book is also notable for the language used.  After the first few introductory chapters, the language becomes more complex, and there is a definite stream-of-consciousness style, with obvious influences.  Many passages evoke Woolf, and at the heart of the novel the writing becomes almost Joycean in its confusion:

"The wind is wind is water wind or water white in pockets of the eyes was once a sheep before time froze the plover call alew aloo atingle is the wire that white voice across the plain on thistle thorn the wind pricks face the licked fire the wind flame tossing out distance on a reel." (p.225)

Thoughts intermingle, sentences start and trail off, cut down by new thoughts, only half-expressed...  It's not easy to push through at times, but it's always worth it.

As far as I know, there's no paperback version of Happy Valley out yet.  Hopefully, it's on its way as it's a fascinating book, and a worthy introduction to a great writer, one more people should try.  Don't be fooled by the name of the book though - Happy Valley?  Only in the ironic Australian use of the word:

"There never was co-operation in Happy Valley, not even in the matter of living, or you might even say less in the matter of living.  In Happy Valley the people existed in spite of each other." (pp.27/8)

Ah, Australia...

'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith' by Thomas Keneally (Review)

Today's post looks at the second of my review copies from Harper Collins Australia taken from the Angus & Robertson Australian Classics range.  The first, Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land, looked at race relations after the arrival of the first fleet in 1788.  This one is set a century later, but as you'll see, little has changed...

*****
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is one of Thomas (or Tom) Keneally's best-known works here in Australia, and it's fairly easy to see why.  It's the story of a half-caste Aborigine who wants to get on in the world, having lost faith, and patience, with the lifestyle of his family and tribe.  With some gentle encouragement from the Methodist minister on the settlement he is attached to, Jimmie decides that he needs to make an effort to succeed in life, an effort which involves leaving the traditional past behind and embracing a white future.

This is 1899 though, and while Australian federation is just around the corner, the birth of a new country does not mean a new era for race relations.  Racism is common, casual and accepted.  Aborigines are still... well, I was going to say second-class citizens, but that would be a lie.  They weren't even counted on the census until the second half of the twentieth century...

Nonetheless, Jimmie knows what he wants, and the best way to get it:

"Possession was a holy state and he had embarked upon it with the Nevilles' shovel.  The Nevilles had succeeded so well as to make Jimmie a snob.  In the mind of the true snob there are certain limited criteria to denote the value of a human existence.  Jimmie's criteria were: home, hearth, wife, land.  Those who possessed these had beatitude unchallengeable.  Other men had accidental, random life.  Nothing better."
pp.16/7 (Angus and Robertson Classics, 2013)

Unfortunately though, Jimmie is never likely to achieve his dreams, and even his marriage to a poor, young white girl is unlikely to help when his bosses continue to despise, cheat and laugh at him.  One day, Jimmie snaps - and the consequences are horrific and legendary...

While Keneally himself claims in a foreword that this is not one of his better books, it's one that has captured the imagination of readers since its publication in 1972.  The key to the story is that Jimmie, unlike his brother Mort (another of the main characters), is the product of a relationship between a white man and a native woman.  He is different both in appearance and mindset to his kin, but unable to completely escape his tribal upbringing and his responsibilities to his extended family.  Caught between two worlds, he is destined to fall into a deep void.

Of course, he is pushed towards his fate by the white men who employ him (while always looking to exploit and cheat him).  Each time Jimmie works hard, his employers' cruelty or meanness forces him to move on, an action which reinforces the stereotype of the lazy 'blackfella' who ups and leaves when he pleases.  Even his time as a police tracker is cut short by a savage, cruel event.

Even so, when we come to the turning point, and Jimmie finally takes his revenge, we are stunned.  The cover of the book makes no secret of the fact that he snaps and commits murder, but we are perhaps conditioned into finding excuses and expect his actions to be almost understandable.  They are nothing of the kind, and the book is all the better for it.  Once Jimmie has time to look back on the event, he expects to feel remorse:

"Jimmie himself still waited for the slump of spirits which could be expected after merciless Friday night.  It failed to come.  He was still in a viable balance between belief and non-belief in the dismembering he had done.  At the same time, the thorough nature of the punishment he had dealt out continued to soothe and flatter him.  Because he had been effective.  He had actually manufactured death and howling dark for people who had such pretensions of permanence.  He had cut down obelisks to white virtue." (p.101)

Instead of regretting his actions, he feels a sense of vindication...

As the great event of Federation draws ever closer though, you sense that Jimmie's time is running out along with that of the old six colonies.  His punishment will be less a noose or a bullet, than a feeling of failure and remorse for the mess he's made of other people's lives.  After spending time on the run with Jimmie and his friends, will we feel more sympathy for the murderer?  I suspect that will depend on the individual reader...

While The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a great read, it does start slowly, and the first half can be a little predictable in its lament of a poor Aborigine cheated by the nasty white man (the dated racist jibes at the English wore a little thin too...).  However, once we reach the pivotal point of the story, it turns into something more, a subtle, complex exploration of what it means to be caught between cultures in a society which is, literally, black and white.  There were no shades of grey (or light-brown) in the eyes of nineteenth-century Australians...

Oh, one last thing (and it's probably something I should have mentioned earlier).  This novel is based on a true story, and while some of the names and dates have been changed, the basic plot is the same.  There really was a Jimmie (Governor, not Blacksmith) living at the end of the nineteenth century, who married a white woman and went on a killing spree, ending up the same way as his fictional namesake.  Perhaps that makes the story even more powerful than it already is...

'The Timeless Land' by Eleanor Dark (Review)

It's been a squeeze, but I've just managed to fit in a second review for Kim's Australian Literature Month.  While last week I talked about a modern classic, today's post focuses on a real classic, a book which looks back to the late eighteenth century.  There's a boat on the horizon, and the First Fleet will soon be in sight...

*****
Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land (one of the reissued Angus and Robertson Classics series, review copy courtesy of Harper Collins Australia) was first published in 1941, but tells of the first years of European settlement in Australia, from the arrival of the first fleet in 1788 to the departure of the first Governor in 1792.  It's a meticulously-researched, fictionalised account of life and struggles in the new colony, where the British colonists (and convicts) attempt to obtain a first toehold on a vast, timeless continent.

We start though, not with the white men, but with Bennilong, a member of the local Aboriginal tribe.  He and his father, a famous Youara-gurrugin (a maker of songs), have long been expecting the return of the white men in their 'winged boats', and often trek out to the cliffs, hoping for a glimpse of the ships.  It is not until after his father's death that Bennilong's vision is realised, but the dream soon turns sour.  You see, unlike last time, when the white men soon went home, it appears that this time the visitors are here to stay.

Gradually, the natives realise that this is not a mere interlude in their timeless tribal story, but a turning point, a change in something they had considered changeless.  The Governor of the first colony, Arthur Phillip, does his best to accommodate the natives, and initial mistrust turns to uneasy cooperation, interspersed by conflict.  The native tribes are willing to share the land, even helping the white intruders in their initial difficulties, but it soon becomes clear that this is not a visit, but an invasion...

The Timeless Land is an excellent piece of historical fiction which, while not always literary, is a fascinating glimpse of life post-1788.  It's a vivid picture of life in a new world, and the changing of a timeless culture - as such, it works better than any history book ever could.  Dark succeeds in evoking the sensations of the new country, the smells, the heat, the feeling of dust on the skin...  And it's not just the white man's view that we get to see - the writer also succeeds in showing us familiar ideas in a new way:

"The black man's lean forefinger pointed urgently towards a gap between the tree-tops, and then, in the dust beside the fire, made marks to show the position of the stars he meant, so that Johnny was able to see them quite clearly.  There were four very bright ones, arranged something like a cross, and a fifth, dimmer and smaller nearby.  Two of the bright ones, Johnny was told, were great warriors who had fought for a woman called Namirra, and wounded each other so badly that they both died; and the other two were their brothers, who had been so overcome by grief that they killed Namirra, who was now the fifth pale star, and then killed themselves too."
p.266 (Angus and Robertson Classics, 2013)

For white Australians, this is a new take on our most famous constellation, the Southern Cross...

The novel runs to almost six-hundred pages, and that gives the writer plenty of scope to explore the realities of life in a colony far from home.  Having begun as a place to dump undesirables from Mother England, the colony has a surplus of unhappy convicts (both male and female) and a lack of the people who would actually be useful (e.g. farmers and tradesmen).  There aren't enough tools or decent clothing, and as the gaps between the arrival of supply ships stretches out into months, the threat of starvation looms ever closer.  Controlling the colony and constructing a town is hard enough then, so the frequent infighting and power struggles between the civilian and military authorities is not exactly going to help matters any.

Fascinating as the internal politics of the British are though, the main focus is, of course, on the clash of two very different cultures, each obeying their own tribal law.  The difference between the two is so great that the word 'alien' is unavoidable, and in fact some of the scenes could come out of a work of Science-Fiction (or Speculative Fiction).  When Bennilong muses about the Bereewolgal ('the men from far, far away'), strange, hairless beings carrying gooroobera (magic firesticks), the image is not one of Australia, but of a remote, dusty planet...

Just as in any good space story, The Timeless Land has its moment of first contact, and Dark captures the meeting of the two leaders with stark, brutal honesty:

"Tirrawuul saw a smallish man, quite incredibly ugly, with a pale face and a very large nose.  He was covered from head to foot, and, though his coverings were not as splendid as those of the men with the weapons, Tirrawuul, himself a leader, could recognise in him a confidence and authority which required no outward trappings.
     Phillip saw an elderly savage, quite incredibly ugly, with greying tangled hair, and alert dark eyes.  He was stark naked, and strangely ornamented with raised scars across his body and upper arms.  But he stood very erect, and wore his air of leadership with unconscious dignity.  For the present, at all events, they assured each other wordlessly, there need be no bloodshed." (p.40)

If only the two groups can find some more common ground...

One of the more surprising aspects of the novel though is that it's not just a two-way conflict.  As wide as the gulf between the whites and the natives is, the gap between the colonists and the prisoners is every bit as wide.  The convicts make up a third, separate, group, and they have just as much (or as little) in common with their captors as with the original inhabitants of their new home.  Not that this means that the natives have sympathy with them.  Bennilong sees them as an inferior race, a group of men who allow themselves to be ordered around and sent to dishonourable deaths.  In his eyes, 'the subordinate tribe' are not real men...

While the novel (the first in a trilogy) has multiple strands and a whole host of characters, both real and imagined, the reader always comes back to two: Governor Phillip and the fiery Bennilong.  Fate has decreed that they be there at the start of something much bigger than themselves or their tribes, and both are changed (not necessarily for the better) by the encounter.  The two grow to admire aspects of the other culture, and they are formed by the land, making something new - the start of a new country.

The Timeless Land was written in the late 1930s, so by today's standards, it may appear a little ethnocentric at times.  On occasion, the Aborigines are portrayed as being a little childlike in their thinking, and the idea of the noble savage is overplayed.  However, Dark casts just as critical an eye on the behaviour of the settlers (or, if you prefer, the invaders), and while some of the ideas of the first Europeans are praised, the actions and greed that corrupted these ideals are scrutinised.  Of course, seen from the other side, the European insistence on progress appears very strange indeed:

"They were like bees or ants, these white people, Daringha said.  They toiled and they swarmed, always moving, always going hurriedly from one place to another, always dragging things about, building, struggling, making a labour of their life." (p.441)

That's a view which I quite agree with...

The sequels will be coming out in new Angus and Robertson Classics versions later this year, and while historical fiction isn't usually my thing, I'd love to read the rest of the story.  The Timeless Land takes us from 1788 to 1792, but the sequels will take us into the early nineteenth century to see what becomes of the tiny settlement at the bottom of the world...

...otherwise known as Sydney ;)

'Seven Types of Ambiguity' by Elliot Perlman (Review)

April 2013 has been designated by Kim, over at Reading Matters, as Australian Literature Month, and as I've neglected books from my adopted home country over the past couple of years, I thought it was time to join in the fun :)  Rather than try out something new though, I decided to revisit one of my favourite Aussie writers - and his best book.  This is a modern classic, and it takes place right here in my home town...

*****
Elliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity is a 600-page novel set in 1990s Melbourne.  It's an ambitious work written in seven parts, each narrated by a different voice, and it centres on Simon Heywood, a depressed former primary school teacher.  Simon, a man of great intelligence, empathy and charisma, is unable to function normally after a child in his care disappeared, and his father employs psychologist Alex Klima to try to snap him out of it.

After initial misgivings, Alex becomes closer to Simon, treating him more like a friend than a patient.  With the help of Angelique, a prostitute who has also fallen for Simon's charms, he attempts to drag Simon up from the depths of his despair.  It's not quite that easy though - at the end of the first part, Simon snaps and does the unthinkable...

The problem is the object of Simon's obsession, his university girlfriend Anna.  He has never been able to get over their relationship, and she remains the idealised perfect woman.  There is an unhealthy obsession here, one he is unable to get rid of.  As he explains to Alex...

"Listen - all that she was then, all that she is now, those gestures, everything I remember but won't or can't articulate anymore, the perfect words that are somehow made imperfect when used to describe her and all that should remain unsaid about her - it is all unsupported by reason.  I know that.  But that enigmatic calm that attaches itself to people in the presence of reason - it's something from which I haven't been able to take comfort, not reliably, not since her."p.8 (Picador, 2004)

Unhappily married with a son, Anna is unaware of what is happening to Simon.  Until, that is, Simon kidnaps her son, Sam...

The set-up is probably good enough for a book as it is, but Seven Types of Ambiguity is far more than a simple story about a kidnapping.  As in another recent Australian novel (Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap), this one event provides the backdrop for a look at society.  It consists of a series of lengthy first-person narratives, moving backwards and forwards, examining events from other perspectives.  It's also brutally, painfully honest.

What's it all about?  Well, while it has  a lot to say about the nature of obsession, its main focus is on an uncaring society.  Perlman explores the stigma attached to mental health, contrasting the ideal of a caring ethos with the stark reality of the triumph of the 'free' market.  You see, 1990s Australia is a dog-eat-dog world - a cold wind's a blowin'...

"It's the times.  The times, they have changed.  Where once people were told that the answers were blowing in the wind, now it's they who are blown by the wind, the wind generated by the market.  The ruthless pursuit of the bottom line is the siren song of the times and the song is played over the public address system in banks, in stores and supermarkets.  It's played when you are downsized because your company can replace you with somebody in another country for two dollars a day.  And it's played whenever you call up anywhere needing assistance and they put you on hold because they've cut back on staff in order to increase their share price." (p.163)

Simon's rant about Neo-liberal philosophies are very a much a sign of their time - but somehow, it all sounds strangely familiar...

The old cry of 'turn on, tune out' is appropriate for a generation of apathy, a picture which is deftly painted over the course of the novel.  There is a media obsession with trivialities, witch-hunts and trial by soundbite.  By contrast, Alex's crusade against the introduction of US-style 'managed care' is seen as more Quixotic than realistic.  There's an overwhelming sense of a drive towards conformity: no divorce (no matter how bad the marriage), the childishness of the corporate retreat, even the look-the-other-way culture of the prison Simon finds himself in.  Freedom, though, is in short supply.  Simon and Alex rage against it all - and they're the mad ones?

As noted above, Seven Types of Ambiguity has a lot in common with The Slap, quite apart from its Melbourne setting.  Both use multiple points of view to give a wider perspective of a particular community, and both take one pivotal event and explore the repercussions of disturbing the status quo.  Where they differ is in the writing, and in the type of people the authors take as their guinea pigs.  Tsiolkas concentrates on a lower social group and is much more visceral in his writing, and some people have criticised Perlman for what they see as a more middle-class elitist story. I'd have to say that I prefer Perlman's style - and his story.

The key to it all is Perlman's portrayal of Simon, and the two pictures of Anna (the ideal and the flawed).  If Simon doesn't come across as someone worth empathising with (and, lest we forget, he did kidnap a child), then the whole novel will fall apart - the story relies on the reader understanding and forgiving Simon.  Fortunately, for me at least, Simon is a sympathetic figure, a man who understands and feels too much.  There's even a temptation to see him as a kind of Christ figure, humane and sympathetic amongst the madness and greed of the modern world.  Oh - and he has a lot of suffering in store...

The title of the novel comes from linguist and literary critic William Empson's work of the same name.  Empson's book explains how the beauty of poetry stems from seven types of linguistic ambiguity, and naturally it is a book the erudite Simon adores (he even named his dog Empson).  Like Simon, Empson was a bit of a Wunderkind, having written his landmark work in early twenties.  Also like Simon, he was destined to be taken down by societal prejudices; after a servant found a condom in his university rooms, he was banished from the city.  Unlike Simon though, Empson was encouraged in his pursuits, enabling him to achieve his work.  Simon's parents are not quite so supportive of their poetry-loving son.

As important as the linguistic ambiguities are though, Alex stresses another type of ambiguity.  In his eyes, it is the ambiguity of human relationships which is more important, the cause of most of the problems in the novel:

"As far as I was concerned, there were more important ambiguities than the ambiguities of poetic language that Empson talked about.  There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance.  A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations.  And if two people do have different views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives." (p.12)

Perlman goes on to demonstrate this throughout Seven Types of Ambiguity, when the same event is shown through two, or sometimes three, pairs of eyes, allowing the reader to see why events occur as they do.  Relationship can indeed be ambiguous - but so can stories...

Anyone who has made it this far in my tortured review will long have come to the conclusion that I'm a bit of a fan of Perlman's work, and this is easily the novel I like most.  It's very much a story of a certain time and place, yet it's one which is also relevant today.  In fact, while reading this novel, a raft of welfare 'reforms' were passed in the UK, among them plans which would effectively end the National Health Service in its present form.  In that context, Perlman's description of the move to managed care is a scarily eery one...

The Start of a Most Brilliant Career

I've had a copy of Miles Franklin's classic Australian novel My Brilliant Career on my shelves for about six months now, having previously failed to read a library copy and a free Kindle version, but a recent catalyst finally induced me to pick it up and give it a go.  Tom, the amateur reader behind the deceptively-professional Wuthering Expectations, posted twice on it a few weeks ago, and his comments persuaded me that it was time to head out into the bush.  Care to join me?  Bring a hat, don't forget the sunscreen - oh, and whatever you do, watch where you're walking...

*****
My Brilliant Career is set in the 1890s and narrated by Sybylla Melvyn, a woman looking back at her formative years.  The first ten years of her life, spent in the Australian bush riding horses and splashing around in waterholes, turn her into a bit of a tomboy, and when her father decides to move his family and take on a new career as a dairy farmer, she struggles to adapt to her new, dull existence.

Luckily, after several years of drudgery, she is rescued by her grandmother, who brings her back to her home area of Caddagat to live a slightly more refined existence.  Here Sybylla once again encounters books, society and men - in particular, the rich, sun-beaten and taciturn landholder Harold Beecham.  With a male protagonist whose emotions run deep below his rugged exterior, you could be forgiven for having fleeting thoughts of a Darcy or a Rochester.  Sybylla though is no Lizzie or Jane...

Franklin wrote the first version of the book when she was just sixteen, but apart from the odd over-flowery expression it's hard to believe that this is the case.  My Brilliant Career is a superb depiction of life as a woman in the late 19th-century, a creature trapped by her gender in a stifling, unsuitable life.  The title is a sarcastic one, referring to Sybylla's thoughts on the agony of her lot in life, destined (like her mother) to wear herself to the bone for nothing.

Despite her fiery nature, poor Sybylla has virtually no choice in the direction of her future.  Trapped in a poor existence by her father's drunken ineptitude, she is shifted from house to house without ever having a say in matters.  If she could just resign herself to her fate, she knows she would be happier; however:

"...I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse.  The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and doubly, trebly so, for her."
p.30 (Text Classics, 2012)

It's not as if she has any great prospect of escape.  If she needs any hints as to her probable future, the figures of her exhausted mother and her jilted spinster aunt should give her a glimpse of how she is likely to end up.

Sybylla, however, is not one to compromise.  She is a superb character, allegedly plain, but self-evidently intelligent, loving and very ambitious.  Like any Austen heroine, she loves her books and her dancing; unlike her English counterparts, she's not averse to more masculine pursuits.  She's just as at home on the back of a horse, or in the driver's seat of a carriage, as she is in the ballroom - just don't leave any whips hanging around... 

Anyone who enjoys classic English literature will find a lot to like in My Brilliant Career as there are a lot of similarities with novels from the mother country.  The daily life inside the houses of the more well-off families is remarkably similar to that in many English novels, and (as mentioned) the importance of literature is just as prominent.  A scene where the family holds a feast for all the workers to celebrate the Prince of Wales' birthday is also Hardyesque in its bringing together of all the social groups on the property.

However, this is not my home land, this is my adopted country, and My Brilliant Career, perhaps more than almost any other book I've read, really brings home the fact that Australia is a unique place.  Sybylla sets out on searing hot days, under impossibly blue skies, with magpies swooping on the unwary (which is a lot scarier than it sounds - trust me...).  Jackaroos abound - not small marsupials but men who work on gigantic cattle farms.  The temperature (still measured in fahrenheit in those days) is often over 100 degrees in the shade...

...and even sentences which could have been lifted directly from Austen are unable to escape their Australian influence.  If we look at a sentence (which Tom, again, got to first), a quick glance reveals a very Victorian scene:

"Several doors and windows of the long room opened into the garden, and [...] it was delightful to walk amid the flowers and cool oneself between dances." p.208

Austenesque?  Absolutely.  But the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the square brackets in the middle of the sentence.  So, what exactly has been omitted?  Let's look at the full sentence...

"Several doors and windows of the long room opened into the garden, and, provided one had no fear of snakes, it was delightful to walk amid the flowers and cool oneself between dances." p.208

I think we can all agree that as wonderful as Saint Jane's writing can be, her novels really don't contain enough posionous snakes...

All in all, My Brilliant Career is worthy of the hype.  It's a great book, precocious but profound, a feminist classic in which the heroine follows her own desires against the expectations of society, her family and the man who loves her.  You should read this - you'll probably like it :)

*****
Before I go, I'd just like to make a few notes on the text (no pun intended).  Text Publishing is a small press based in Melbourne, and in May this year they brought out a series called Text Classics.  The series comprises a few dozen famous Australian books, in a variety of genres, with introductions by celebrity fans of the books.  They have distinctive, yellow-based covers, and they cost just AU$12.95 each (with, as far as I can tell, free worldwide delivery).  In a country where you virtually need a mortgage to regularly buy books (and where life appears more Americanised every day...) providing affordable, quality, classic Aussie literature is a public service, and one I applaud them for - bravo :)  Anyone interested in literature Down Under could do a lot worse than checking out the Text Classics series as their starting point...

A Promise is a Promise...

In the middle of my recent spate of Icelandic books, I read Sarah Moss' Names for the Sea, a non-fiction book about a year an English woman spent in Iceland.  While entertaining, it was very much an outsider's view of the country and left me wishing that there had been a little more insight into Icelandic life.

Which is when I spotted another book on the subject, this time written by a man who had spent much of his youth shuttling between Iceland, England and Australia.  Luckily enough, I was able to obtain a review copy from the publisher, University of Queensland Press (UQP), to see how the insider's point of view compared to the outsider's...

*****
The Promise of Iceland was written by Australian university lecturer Kári Gíslason, possibly to work through some of the events of his earlier life.  Gíslason was born in Iceland to an Anglo-Australian mother, the result of a lengthy affair she had with a married Icelandic man.  Despite the welcoming attitude of most Icelanders to any child, Gíslason's mother decided to respect the wishes of the reticent father, keeping his identity a secret for the best part of three decades.

As surprising as this decision was, what was even more astonishing was that the son also decided to respect his mother's wishes, refusing to break his mother's promise, even though it caused financial and social hardship.  Iceland is all about family, and being unable to acknowledge your heritage makes you an outsider in a country which should be your own.  Shuttled between England, Iceland and Australia, young Kári grows up with his secret, unwilling to tell any of the friends and family who would have been only to eager to help out.  Until, one day, he finally decides that it's time for everyone to face the truth...

The Promise of Iceland is a compelling narrative, exploring Gíslason's early life and providing a welcome insight into Icelandic culture.  Many of the features appearing in other Icelandic books I've read are highlighted here, such as the small, closed society and the relative freedom of childhood.  When Gíslason's mother, Susan, is pregnant with her son, she fears that her status as a single mum will cause her problems with her employers - which is not the case at all.  In fact, her surly boss is very happy for her (as is her landlord):

It was a conversation that was repeated almost word for word when she spoke to her landlord, Brynjólfur, about whether she would be able to stay in her apartment in Sólvallagata.
"What do you mean?" he said.
"Now that I'm having a baby."
"What did you think we'd do, dear?  Kick you out?"
That's exactly what she'd thought.  She couldn't quite believe that a child could be so welcomed. p.72 (University of Queensland Press, 2012) 

In England or Australia in 1972, Susan would almost definitely have ended up homeless and unemployed...

As you may have gathered, for much of the book, The Promise of Iceland is just as much about Susan as it is about Kári himself.  In telling us about her, the writer attempts to make the reader understand why he agreed to keep her promise.  After only reading the blurb, I idly wondered why he thought he had the right to break this promise at all.  Once I'd actually read some of the book, I was more amazed at his even considering not outing his father.  The writer attempts to explain his reasoning for making his own promise to his father at the age of seventeen:

The point is that I wanted to do the right thing, by both my parents and my country.  I wanted to do the loving thing and, in 1990, it seemed positively wrong to be the ruin of his family life. (p.130)

Later his attitude changes as he comes to feel that he has been robbed of the family life he deserves.  We feel his tension as he returns, once again, to Iceland, this time to meet his half-brothers and sisters...

*****
There are obvious comparisons with Names for the Sea, and the same themes pop up, whether it's the attitude towards children, the obsession with coffee and knitting, or Reykjavik's small-town atmosphere (at one point the writer regularly bumps into Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in a shop - a woman who was the country's President at the time!).  In other ways though, Gíslason's background means that The Promise of Iceland is a very different book.  Moss was a tourist; Gíslason was a (semi-) native.  Moss visited the distant Westfjord islands; Gísalason lived and worked there.  Where Moss was frustratingly introspective at times, Gíslason opens the country up for us.

All of which makes The Promise of Iceland an excellent work.  Well written, fascinating and absorbing, the book pulls the reader along on Kári's search for closure and fulfilment, making us hope he can find the acknowledgement he's after.  You may think that the issue would have lost most of its significance after so much time, but you'd be wrong.  You see, for much of his life, Kári's family name was Reid, one belonging to the man his mother married (and was separated from) long before her son was born.  Gíslason is actually the patronymic derived from the name of his father, Gísli.  Just by using his full name on the cover, the writer is showing how much his identity means to him...

From the Hands of Our Fathers...

Lisa, of ANZ LitLovers, has declared the first week of July Indigenous Literature Week, and when the Queen of Australian literary blogs says that, it must be so ;)  This week then, I've got a couple of reviews for you by indigenous writers, one from either side of the Tasman - and we're starting today on our side of the ditch...

*****
Larissa Behrendt's Legacy is a novel centred on Simone Harlowe, an Aboriginal law student studying for her doctorate at Harvard.  We first meet her on her way to a regular catch-up with her supervisor, Professor Young, a man she greatly admires.  As an outsider looking in on their educated discussion, it looks as if they are two people without a care in the world - but appearances can be very deceptive.

Simone decides to pay a surprise visit home to Sydney to see her parents, housewife mum Beth Ann and famous Aboriginal rights campaigner Tony.  Far from being a happy homecoming, however, Simone's extended stay reopens old wounds and unearths new problems.  Meanwhile, back in Boston, Simone's Professor is about to make a decision that will affect his Australian student more than she could have imagined...

While Legacy, as you would expect, does have a political side, the main focus of the novel is on relationships, especially family ties.  The headstrong Simone, who idolised her father as a young girl, is unable to forgive him when she discovers his feet of clay, shocked to discover that the man who represents his people on the national stage is every bit as flawed as everyone else.  It takes some advice from her closest friends to make her realise that the real world works very differently to how she'd pieced it together from her law books.

Behrendt's story is an entertaining one, a page-turner which I raced through in a matter of hours.  The multiple view-points allow the reader to experience events from two or three angles, revealing the contrast between the facts and what certain characters perceive.  In a story which could divide along the lines of fathers and daughters, it is perhaps appropriate that Simone has to learn that things aren't always black and white.

Interesting as it is though, I did have several issues with Legacy.  For one thing, the history of the Aboriginal rights movement, an important part of the story, seemed shoe-horned in, great amounts of information dumped into the reader's path, often obstructing the story's progress.  I also had issues with some of the conversations, the dialogue seeming a little stilted and unrealistic at times.

Another drawback was the way in which there seemed to be a multitude of strong women and weak men.  This portrayal of the men as weak, betrayed by their instincts, was a little annoying.  When you set this next to the character of Simone, a character not a million miles away from that of the writer herself, it seems a little... self-indulgent?  Certainly, if I were to write a novel about a teacher and literary blogger and then had another character praise his intelligence, I'd expect to be laughed at a little...

I'm sure many readers will disagree with my assessment (most usually do...), but even with these issues, Legacy is an entertaining novel, and I'm definitely glad I gave it a go.  It's just that if I'm being fair, Legacy has to compete on an equal basis with all the other novels I've read and reviewed on the blog.  Interesting?  Yes.  Entertaining?  Yes.  A great piece of literature?  No.  But then, that might be exactly what you're after ;)